Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Ibn Warraq speaks at Yale

(Editor’s note: The renowned scholar of Islam recently spoke at Yale. Here is an outline of the talk he gave. — RS)

First, I should like to thank The William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale for inviting me. I should also like to thank my friends and colleagues whose ideas have profoundly influenced what I am going to say today: Sebastian Gorka, Katherine Gorka, Robert Reilly, and Hugh Fitzgerald.

James Burnham’s book Suicide of the West is full of insights on US Foreign Policy, which I find relevant to this day. In fact one has only to substitute “Islam” for “communism” in many of his observations to realise their continuing pertinence. I shall limit myself to one of his observations from Chapter XII, Dialectic of Liberalism:

“The communists divide the world into “the zone of peace” and “the zone of war”. The zone of peace means the region that is already subject to communist rule; and the label signifies that within their region the communists will not permit any political tendency, violent or non-violent, whether purely internal or assisted from without, to challenge their rule. The “zone of war” is the region where communist rule is not yet, but in due course will be established; and within the zone of war the communists promote, assist and where possible lead political tendencies, violent or non-violent, democratic or revolutionary, that operate against non-communist rule. Clear enough, these definitions. You smash the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, and support Fidel Castro; you know where you are going.” Pp.227-228. The above could easily have been a dictionary definition of the Islamic doctrine of Jihad, and its notions of “Dar al-Islam” –the Zone of Peace, and Dar-al Harb –Zone of War”

Now onto my main points:

Our foreign policy should be guided by understanding and admitting the following realities:

We are engaged in a war of ideas, with our principal enemy: an ideology.

An ideology that will not collapse out of economic incompetence.

The ideology of the terrorists is religiously based and derived from Islam and its founding texts, the Koran, hadith, and the sunna, and the history of the early caliphate.

One, but not the only, way we know this is because they tell us so. First , if you want to understand the enemy “Read what they say”. They constantly justify their acts with accurate and apt citations from the Koran and Hadith. They also refer to, among others, Sayyid Qutb’s work Milestones, Abdullah Azzam’s Defense of the Muslim Lands, S. K. Malik’s The Quranic Concept of Power, and Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. Some of the latter have doctorates from recognized Islamic universities, and to hear John Kerry trying to tell them their ideas have nothing to do with Islam is comical.

Islamic terrorism is not caused by “poverty, lack of education, sexual deprivation, psychological problems, or lack of economic opportunity..”, Western Imperialism, or Western decadence, or the Arab-Israeli conflict.

There are two kinds of Jihad: terrorism, and slow penetration of Western institutions subverting Western laws and customs from within.

Ignorance, naivety, arrogance, political correctness , sheer laziness, sentimentality, and Saudi, Qatari and Iranian money have led to Islamist successes in penetrating Western institutions, from the Voice of America, The Pentagon, CIA, FBI, DHS, PBS, to the universities and colleges where Islamic propaganda is shamelessly and openly disseminated.

While groups such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, and others are non-state actors, they are funded by states such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. These three countries, for example, also provide the necessary Islamic support, framework, and propaganda that spews forth anti-Western and and anti-American hatred. They should be warned or face the consequences.

It is also important to point out that it is not something we have done that is impelling the Islamists. Constantly apologising, Mr President, is pointless; they will not like or respect you the more.

We must learn the lessons of the cold war, for there are striking similarities between the Islamist ideology and that of Soviet Russia [Cf B.Russell, Jules Monnerot, Maxime Rodinson]

Speak out in support of the Christians who are being persecuted, and being killed almost every day in Islamic countries. Profound importance of this act of solidarity not realised by many in West.

In order to succeed we need urgently to recover our civilizational self-confidence.

One way we can fight jihadist ideology is to undermine their certainties, and one can accomplish this with Koranic Criticism. In the West, Spinoza hastened the Enlightenment by his Biblical Criticism.

There is an obvious need to understand the Islamic ideology to understand the mindset of the Islamic terrorists. Terrorism is not caused by poverty, and so on. It is their ideology that motivates them and is the source of its moral legitimacy. Without it, terrorism cannot exist.Terrorists are produced by a totalitarian ideology justifying terrorism.

While America has had some impressive tactical successes, and has managed to kill Osama bin Laden (May 2011) and Anwar al-Awlaki (in Sept.2011) it still fails to understand their goals, their ideology. The reasons for this failure are many:

First, there is a reluctance to address the religious inspiration of the acts of terrorism,to admit that their ideology is derived from Islam and its founding texts, the Koran, the Hadith, the Sunna and the early history of the Caliphate. Instead, the present administration exhorts us to use euphemisms such as “violent extremist”. “WhereasThe 9/11 Commission Report, published under the presidency of George W. Bush in July 2004 as a bipartisan product, had used the word Islam 322 times, Muslim 145 times, jihad 126 times, and jihadist 32 times,The National Intelligence Strategy of the United States, issued by the Obama administration in August 2009, used the term Islam 0 times, Muslim 0 times, jihad 0 times.” Now Obama’s policy applies to internal government documents as well, which can only have disastrous consequences for our understanding of political groups and events in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and South and South East Asia. “How can one possibly analyze the power and appeal of this ideology, the way that ideas set its strategy and tactics, why it is such a huge menace if any reference to the Islamic religion and its texts or doctrines isn’t permitted?”

Perhaps it was only in 1946, when George Kennan’s wrote his classified ‘Long Telegram’ that America began to understand the nature of the Soviet Union, why it acted the way it did, how the Kremlin thought, and why the USSR was a grave threat to America. In other words it took three decades to understand the mind of the enemy.

To complicate matters further, today there are two enemies: first, non-European, religiously informed non-state terrorist groups, like ISIS. Second, and equally dangerous, states that, in fact, fund and support them. There is evidence that, as the The Atlantic reported in June, 2014, “Two of the most successful factions fighting Assad’s forces are Islamist extremist groups: Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). And their success is in part due to the support they have received from two Persian Gulf countries: Qatar and Saudi Arabia.”

Our ability to fight al Qaeda and similar transnational terrorist actors will depend upon our capacity to communicate to our own citizens and to the world what it is we are fighting for and what it is that the ideology of Jihad threatens in terms of the values we hold so dear.

To quote Sun Tsu, in war it is not enough to know the enemy in order to win. One must first know oneself. However, with the end of the Cold War America and the West understandably lost clarity with regard to what it was about its way of life that was precious and worth fighting for.

James Burnham explains with exemplary clarity the reasons for this loss of self-confidence, and what he wrote is still, mutatis mutandis, relevant:

“Judging a group of human beings- a race, nation, class or party- that he considers to possess less than their due of well-being and liberty, the liberal is hard put to it to condemn that group morally for acts that he would not hesitate to condemn in his fellows.

“When the Western liberal’s feeling of guilt and his associated feeling of moral vulnerability before the sorrows and demands of the wretched become obsessive, he often develops a generalized hatred of Western civilization and of his own country as a part of the West. We can frequently sense this hatred in …[journals like] The Nation.”

In order to succeed we need urgently recover our civilizational self-confidence.

Ronald Reagan was able to succeed because he was supremely confident of the moral and spiritual superiority of his cause. He was thus able to state with certainty and without hesitation that the SovietEmpire was evil. He was not afraid to confront reality. He was able to defend our values because he believed in them totally. He told an audience at Moscow State University, “Go into any schoolroom [in America], and there you will see children being taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights-among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-that no government can justly deny….”

John Lenczowski describes what Reagan advocated unapologetically, “Altogether, the various ideas of freedom, democracy, human rights, moral order, and the dignity of the human person were promoted not only by the President’s rhetoric and personal moral witness but by the Administration as a whole in numerous forms: in Voice of America editorials, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty broadcasts, in articles in United States Information Agency-published magazines targeted at Soviet-bloc populations, on the USIA-run billboard on the sidewalk outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow, in American diplomats’ addresses at various international fora, in the distribution of books to Soviet bloc audiences and U.S.libraries abroad, in films distributed abroad, and so on.”

To quote Asian columnist Banyan in the Economist,“For all its flaws and mis-steps, [America] represents not just economic and military might, but an ideal to aspire to, in a way that China does not. And when American leaders appear to give less weight to that ideal, they not only diminish America’s attractions, they also lend more credence to the idea of its relative economic and military decline.”

The rest of the world recognizes the virtues of the West. As Arthur Schlesinger remarked, “when Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty.”

I wonder if Robert Spencer could provide a link for a full transcript of Ibn’s talk at Yale. I’ve just given a public speech outlining Mr Warraq’s comments, as conveyed in this article, and have been surprised by the high level of interest shown by quite a few people from across the political spectrum. Who knows, this could be one of those levers for change.

“Go into any schoolroom [in America], and there you will see children being taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights-among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-that no government can justly deny….”

Interesting. I wasn’t aware that Ronald Reagan said that. In the age of the Obamunist I would suggest these days are long gone. Today, the kids are being indoctrinated with Islam….

Well, where I am called to professionally swindle the young in social studies classes, I make the kids read the opening of the DOI and ask, “Alright, according to Mr. Jefferson, where do rights come from?” It takes a while to draw their minds back to the text itself to let them realize that rights do NOT come from the government.

That should be obvious. The examples you give do clearly show the pitfalls. In a dictatorship then rights can be taken away abitrarily.
In a theocracy then rights are determined by reference to the ancient scribblings of squabbling clans of illiterate bronze age goat-herders; or worse, 7th century Arab barbarians.

But in a democracy that has developed out of tried and tested principles of men like John Adams, Thomas Paine, Spinoza, Voltaire…; and adopted by common consent for the good of society as a whole. Or something like that.

stevea55 if you will search the sources of the UDHR document you will find they are derived from Christian/Judeo ethics. The magazine “The Christian Research Journal” Vol. 37/ No. 04 / 2014 has an article “Jesus Shaped Cultures” that documents this along with human rights as per ancient Greeks, Plato, Aristotle, and some of the enlightenment thinkers, and footnoted for further study. I believe you would find it interesting and informative.

Ibn Warraq’s book ‘Leaving Islam – Apostates Speak Out’ is highly recommended for people interested in the accounts and impressions of people who have left Islam and includes a biographical section by Mr Ali Sina of Faith Freedom International, perhaps the best known Apostate alive today. While the media regularly engage Muslems and non Muslims in commentary about Islamic terrorism, the comments of Ex Muslims are rarely canvassed, so this book helps to bridge that gap.

“It is their ideology that motivates them and is the source of its moral legitimacy. Without it, terrorism cannot exist.Terrorists are produced by a totalitarian ideology justifying terrorism.”
———————–

Ibn Warraq”s main advice to the westerners-(“10).”Speak out in support of the Christians who are being persecuted, and being killed almost every day in Islamic countries. Profound importance of this act of solidarity not realised by many in West”
We,in the west do a great injustice to our much persecuted Christian brothers in distress in Islamic countries like Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and other Islamic countries. Even the Western religious heads just avoid to talk about them. Such is the plight of ‘Christian love and brotherhood’! Our President avoids talking about Christians like poison. Not long ago, he was shedding tears at the plight of Burmese Muslims, who are supposed to have been chased out of that country. But he avoids even to mention the plight of persecuted Christians like he Copts of Egypt, who were the original sons of the soil of Egypt, but being chased away and persecuted by the Arabs, who came from outside. Pope to take it cool and advises those Christians to bear it silently and he will be praying for them!

“Judging a group of human beings- a race, nation, class or party- that he considers to possess less than their due of well-being and liberty, the liberal is hard put to it to condemn that group morally for acts that he would not hesitate to condemn in his fellows..”

Pessimistic? Yes! For I am being realistic. The nine-eleven terrorist attack occurred over ten years ago and our plight is even more bleak than it was then. Now more than then, we are more infiltrated and more accommodating (or pandering) to the Mohammedans, who are much more emboldened as a consequence to the weakness exhibited at all levels of institutional authority. Opposed to this situation is a minority of dissenters who challenge the establishment’s policies of appeasement. Websites like this one and scholars like Mr. Spencer and Mr. Warraq and others continue their work with seemingly little effect on the broad picture.

Fifty years hence, the debate will be very familiar to us here now, though most of us won’t be here to witness it. Our successors will sound the alarm of the encroaching takeover of our civilization, whatever will be left of it by then, by the Mohammedans through terrorism and stealth. I am afraid that there will be a lot more suicide bombings in the West, along with more honor killings and other kinds of violence, more Islamic dress on display publicly, more blasphemy laws implemented, less freedom of speech, and sites like this one may not be possible then. Like a frog slowly boiled in water, most people will adjust to the conditions. There will be the few who continue to dissent against the prevailing conditions and harken back nostalgically to a freer epoch. Lamentably, they may have to be more discrete in their assertions.

All we need are leaders who know about Islam and the dangers it poses to our freedom. But how much knowledge do you need to possess to know that Islam is a mortal danger to freedom? Do you need to be familiar with the Koran and all the other Mohammedan texts to know that? Should we expect our leaders to be able to articulate the teachings of Islam and perform a dialectical criticism of those texts? How much knowledge do we want them to possess? We need people like Mr. Spencer to be a source where we can turn to in order to better understand the threat. But I don’t believe our leaders need more knowledge than what any rational unencumbered person should observe in life as lived. I find it hard to believe that they do not know what is happening. It is very possible that they refuse to believe what they see. It may be that simple. The motivation for their ignorance or suspected ignorance may be important to understand. I don’t know what it is going to take, but it sure is going to require more than education to change things.

“Fifty years hence, the debate will be very familiar to us here now, though most of us won’t be here to witness it. Our successors will sound the alarm of the encroaching takeover of our civilization, whatever will be left of it by then”

Given the speed of current events and changes, it’s not fifty years; I’d give it 15 to 20 years, maximum!

Wonderful truth and clarity from Ibn Warraq – exactly what we have come to expect.

Yes, most of our political and intellectual leaders are not fighting back ideologically with the energy and intellectual honesty that they should be, but there two grounds for optimism if one takes a longish view.

Additionally, the Pope has recently openly acknowledged that it is the processes of Natural Selection that have lead to the existence of humanity over millions of years. He would realize it provides no room for supernatural entities if he studied it in a bit more detail. Catholics with enquiring and open minds probably will.

The same arguments that show one religion to be false apply equally well to all the others. As the general level of education in the Muslim world improves, which it will despite the rearguard action of the imams and mullahs, so the appeal of a 1,400 years old unquestioning faith will decline even there. The “Muslim world”, as I use the term, includes the immigrant Muslims of Europe and the succeeding generations.

We can take encouragement from Xi Jinping’s recent statement that China must be reducing its carbon emission 16 years from now, not long in the time scales I am writing about. The price of oil can be expected to decline hugely within a few decades and with it, the influence of all the forces that are dependent upon oil based funding.

We must remember that when we fill up our vehicles we are helping to finance the spread of violence, cruelty, oppression and discrimination. We will have to put up with these blights upon the world for as long as we fund them, but we can expect an improvement once we stop.

Superb summary by Ibn Warraq. As I read through his points, it was not Islam my contempt and ire were directed to first and foremost but rather to the current group of Western elites who are letting their societies down most terribly by not recognizing Islam for the heinous belief system which it is. At best these elites are fools of the first order, at worst downright traitors. They truly are disgusting. Just to look upon the face of a Kerry or a Cameron or an Obama fills me with scorn for these completely underwhelming, horribly misdirected human beings.

I would be interested to know how many people heard this speech, and what kind of response it got, and what kind of publicity on-campus.

Are there any frequenters of the Yale campus – students or faculty, or connected therewith – who can report on that?

Note: Any persons here present who are Yale alumni might like to communicate with their alma mater and let those in charge know that they (said alumni) approve mightily of the fact that Ibn Warraq, courageous and intelligent apostate from Islam, author of “Defending the West”, “Leaving Islam”, and “Why I Am Not a Muslim”, was able to speak at Yale on this particular occasion.

You might also suggest that he be invited some more: perhaps to address a Commencement ceremony, or to give the address at a Graduation ceremony.

Because the things he has to say – about “the West”, and about Islam – are very necessary to be brought to the attention both of those young students who are just commencing their tertiary study, and of those who are graduating and heading out into the big, wide and made-ever-more-dangerous-by-Islam world.

Great stuff. Only thing I would question is the death of the West is not a suicide, it will be a murder by specific people who committed treason by lying to get elected then criminally violating their oath of office.

Thank you Ibn Warraq. God protect you from all harm and danger and please continue your work of trying to wake up our leaders in government and the people before it will be too late to be awakened and our descendants suffer greatly as so many are greatly suffering under Islam today. Even thought I believe that God is with us, I still fear for the future of the U.S. and other democratic countries because of the blindness of our leaders. So very much depends on our leaders in the home, in the State, in the schools and especially in the church.

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